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Chieftec BL-01B Case Review

Conclusion:

The Chieftec BL-01B design takes an old idea that was used very commonly by IBM allowing you to minimize the amount of space used on top of your desk and combine both your case and your monitor, which should give it some looks at by people who do not have a lot of space for their computer setup. When I first pulled it out of the package, I did not think that everything including the power supply were going to be able to fit inside of the case and if they did it would be such a tight fit that it was not going to be able to compare in temperatures to the Thermaltake Armor case that it was going head-to-head with. When I got everything installed inside of it, however, everything did fit in there nicely; there was not much room left over once the everything was in place though. There will be a little bit of a size restriction on the CPU cooler that you choose to use inside, but you should be able to fit one of the shorter ones. I liked how everything was set up inside of the case giving you some of the tool-less features when it comes to installing your drives. It would have been nice if Chieftec had adapted some sort of tool-less installation features for the expansion slots. It also would have been nice if they added another fan or two, especially one more for an air intake. The fan that they decided to use was not very powerful as it only spun at 800RPM which did result in more hot air being allowed to build up inside of the case. The layout of the case flipping the motherboard by 180° and putting the CPU at the bottom of the case did have an impact on the temperatures, for the amount of fans and only gaining 4°C on the processor during the Prime 95 test was quite impressive. I did like the way that Cheiftec allowed for a little bit of wire management inside of the case, the two clips below the fan on the left side of the case did allow you to route the wires to where you needed them to go.

If you are looking for a new gaming case to throw all of your high performance hardware in, I would not suggest using this case unless you are wanting to go into water-cooling, which would make this case one of the best choices if you were going to be taking it to a lan party. Even if you were not going to be overclocking any of the components inside of your case, you should be able to have some safe temperatures with air cooling, especially if you upgraded the CPU cooler from the stock solution. If you are just going to be using it for the more simplistic computing tasks such as browsing the internet or using it for writing papers/spreadsheets and would like to do so in a compact place, I would say pick this case up! With a case coming in at only $69, and having all of the features that the Chieftec BL-01B has, it does make it a great value. Temperatures would be a little bit better inside of the case if you would add a few fans, however there are not many places for you to install them. So, if you are willing to modify your case a little bit, go for it.